𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐯𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐢𝐫𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐦

Part IV: Dangerous Words of Lust

Tears are beautiful things.

Tears shield your eyes from the harshness of the pain when your eyes are too numb to face the truth. Tears tell you that you're still alive when you're so broken you can't even think. Tears show you that you still have something inside when you're so drained you feel everything was wrung out of you.

The worst part of running away in a place like this is that you basically can't. I have nowhere to go outside the grimy basement, and Leo would be able to find me there and I'd have to see him all over again and I'm just not sure if I have the strength of mind to look at his pretty face again.

I'm forced to go to sleep with the sticky feeling of half-dry tears on my cheekbones, my curly hair knotted and entangled with dirt and filth and the horribly uncomfortable ache in my back from pressing against a hard, dented metal backrest. I open my eyes, trying to spot a single thing in the heavy blackness of the night to distract myself from him. It is only seven-o-clock yet the sky is as dark as Leo's eyes— oh here we go again.

I decide to try my best to just relax my mind and not think about anything, and unsurprisingly it doesn't work. After a gruelling three-to-four hours of tossing and turning and groaning a whining I finally manage to slip into a slumber littered with dreams about Leo I'm not sure I should say.

Almost as though it were possible, I actually started to think again — perhaps — Leo liked me. What if he didn't though... but what if he did? I mean, he was blushing when I hugged him, and he buried his soft little mouth in my neck. My God. I'm getting a headache even through my numbness and I just can't even feel my hands anymore because my brain is pounding from overthinking so many things that I can't even process properly.

I love Leo.

I love Leo.

I love Leo.

And maybe

just maybe

he loves me back.

I know I'm being stupid and actually hoping for two seconds that this might work, but hope is what got me through my life. Hope is what forced me to believe that I might get better, like this was just some sort of stupid illness that might go away one day. It doesn't hurt to hope for this, for him, because maybe there's a possibility that a normal boy might just fall for a vampire just as hard as the vampire fell for his victim.

My heart is still pounding when I wake up in the morning, just about early enough to gaze at the silvery crack of dawn peering through the small air vent in the basement and the pale chalk-like silhouette of the moon and the sun both pushed between layers of brush-painted clouds. There are many birds chirping today, I notice. There's the groggy cawing of a crow and the tingly murmurs of starlings dangling in the thickness of the cold morning air, as well as the croaky whining squawk of gulls and the cracked trilling of a juvenile caracara.

I just stay up like that for a while, closing my eyes and feeling the weak light pulse through my eyelids and listen to the whistles outside the building because I know that before long, Leo will be walking right through the basement doors again on his way to school.

Just take all my pains and my sins, I think. Take my broken love and my broken past. I just want him to take me, to take me in and hug me like he did last night, to just have me in his arms forever. Someone who really cares for me, someone who actually knows me as well as I once knew myself. But now I am a stranger, even to myself. I feel unfamiliar and unknown and unsafe in my own body, in my own skin. I'm being tortured slowly by my mind, and all I ever want to do is escape, find a person who I can run to when I'm being chased by my conscience and someone I can talk to when my mouth is sealed shut with white lies and untold stories.